Eggs (still) aren't bad for your heart

Once upon a time, eggs were a diet demon. Nowadays, it's no longer thought they're bad for your heart — and new research has lent yet more evidence to that theory.

Researchers from the University of Sydney found that regular egg consumption doesn't increase cardiovascular risk factors for people with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes, in a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"Our research indicates people do not need to hold back from eating eggs if this is part of a healthy diet," said the paper's lead author Dr Nick Fuller, from the university's Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise and Eating Disorders.

In an initial trial, Boden's team recruited 140 patients and assigned them to either a high-egg weight-maintenance diet (12 per week) or a low-egg weight-maintenance diet (less than two per week) for three months. At the end of that time, there were no differences between the groups' cardiovascular risk factors — things like cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar.

In the new study, the same participants were put on three-month-long weight-loss diets that reduced their daily energy intake by about 2,100kj/500 calories and emphasised replacing saturated fat (such as butter) with unsaturated fat (such as avocado and olive oil). They continued their high or low egg intake.

The researchers then followed up with the participants for a further six months, while they stuck to their egg pattern.

At the end of the 12 months, neither group's cardiovascular risk factors had turned for the worse, and they'd both lost similar amounts of weight — up to about 5kg.

The takeaway: so long as your overall diet quality is high, it's unlikely to be a big deal if you're eating a couple of eggs a day.

So how did eggs earn such a bad reputation? It's because they're high in dietary cholesterol, which was once thought to cause high blood cholesterol.

“While eggs themselves are high in dietary cholesterol – and people with type 2 diabetes tend to have higher levels of the 'bad' low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol – this study supports existing research that shows consumption of eggs has little effect on the levels of cholesterol in the blood of the people eating them,” said Fuller in a statement.

"Eggs are a source of protein and micronutrients that could support a range of health and dietary factors including helping to regulate the intake of fat and carbohydrate, eye and heart health, healthy blood vessels and healthy pregnancies," Fuller said.

The research was supported by the industry group Australian Eggs, although it had no input into the design or publication of the paper.